 How do you survive as a maid service owner when all of the odds are stacked against you? You have employees that are quitting right and left and you have customers that are canceling on you and you feel like your business is crumbling and you have financial issues and yet you want to survive. How do you do it? We're going to talk about that today. Hi there. I'm Angela Brown and this is Ask a House Cleaner. This is a show where you get to ask a house cleaning question and I get to help you find an answer. Now, today's show is brought to us by MyCleaningConnection.com and this is a resource hub. It's got podcasts and blogs and books and all different kinds of information from supplies and uniforms and equipment and things that you need to grow your cleaning business. So check it out at MyCleaningConnection.com. All right, on to today's show. This is a super special show and I'm super excited to introduce to you Courtney Wisely from Rescue My Maid Service. Now, this is an ingenious concept because Courtney has been working with ZenMaid software, which is a service software for service professionals. As a result, she's had a chance of speaking to hundreds, maybe even thousands of cleaning business owners. Then she has her own maid service and not only that, she has a new business called Rescue My Maid Service. So from the need she's seen in the marketplace, she started traveling all around the country and diving into head first into maid services that are having some glitches and she's been rescuing them and today she's here with us to share some of her simple solutions on how you can rescue your maid service as well. Please help me welcome the amazing, the one and only Courtney Wisely. Hey there, I'm so excited that you've joined us today and I'm hoping that you will share with us a little bit about your background and this amazing mission that you're on for Rescue My Maid Service. I know you're traveling all over the country. You're meeting with maid services all over and you've been digging up underneath all the rocks, looking at all the things that are going on. Share with us a little bit about that and how it all came to be. Yeah, it's been fascinating to be honest. Honestly, it just started one day, another cleaning business owner down in Jacksonville, Florida. He called me and he was like, I'm at my wit's end. I'm just, I think I'm gonna have to close my business. Everything is falling apart and I have such an emotional heart and I was just like, you know what? I'm not doing anything. I'm just gonna jump on a plane. I'm gonna come help you. So I just jumped on a plane. I flew down there for like four or five days and I stayed there and helped him kind of like turn everything around and get some structure and then from there, somebody heard that I did that and so then they were like, oh, come help me and then it's come help me. And so then before I knew it, it became this thing and I started calling them rescue missions because my company is called Rescue My Maid Service. I'm like, kind of just ties in. It's weird how the fates work and align like that. So I've done 13 in a row now. Every month I go do one for three or four days and it's taken me all the way from California to Philadelphia. It's taken me all over the country, but it's fascinating to see all of the different business owners and how different everybody is, but everybody has the same struggles like all across the country. They're struggling with employees. They're struggling with motivation. They're struggling with everything. So it's been, it's been such a learning opportunity for me just to be able to see how everybody else does things and it helps me with my own maid service. So it's just been a blessing. This past year has been absolutely amazing. So I'm excited to use all the knowledge that I've attained and put together solutions that will help everybody. So I have to ask, since you've been all over the country with all these different maid services, how are you finding good employees to help all these cleaning business owners survive in their businesses? That's definitely the number one problem that everybody faces. And I think the biggest reason why it's such a problem is because the maid service owners don't have time. They don't have time to vet all of these applicants. They'll put an ad out on Facebook or Indeed, which are the two avenues that we use and what most people use. And they'll get, you know, 50 to 100 applicants in a session, but they have to take the time to go through and actually read the application, see if they're good, then they have to call them and then try to put them through a phone interview. Usually they don't answer. They got to leave a message, call them. And it's a nightmare. What I have done is I have simplified the entire process. We use a tool called type form, and that's where we make our job application, which is on a type form. And within type form, they actually have a tool with calculations. So I took the four or five questions that are the musts, like they have to be over 21 or they have to have a license and entered vehicle. They have to be able to pass a background, a drug screen, and they have to be able to work Monday through Friday, eight to five. So those are our five musts, but everybody's different. So what I did was if they said no to any of those questions that would eliminate them, it calculates adds a one. So then at the end of the application, if they have a score above zero, which means that they answered wrong to any of those questions, it eliminates them immediately. And it just comes up with a screen that says, thank you for applying. We will contact you soon if qualified. But the magic happens whenever they pass. And so if they actually pass the screening process, they get to the end and they hit submit, then they are automatically transitioned to a page for Calendly, which that's C-A-L-E-N-D-L-Y. And that is connected to the business owner's Google calendar, which is what most of us kind of like run our lives off of. And it is connected to that. So it prompts the interviewee to schedule a phone interview. So it says, hooray, you passed the screening process, please select from the right your time and day of your phone screening or whatever. So they pick it, they schedule the time. So all the business owner has to do is just sit back and wait for phone calls to pop up on her calendar. She has no more vetting, she has no more going through hundreds of applications, and she doesn't have to worry about calling these people and trying to get them on the phone because it's on them to schedule a phone interview, which eliminates the people that aren't serious about the job and puts the people that are ready for you right in line. So it works awesome. I love the fact that you've automated it all the way to the point where the responsibility is on that of the employee instead of the employer sitting there waiting in a coffee shop for an hour for somebody to test showing up. Exactly. Exactly. And then after that phone interview, of course, that's when we kind of verify those five must questions. And as long as that is accurate and they're like, yes, absolutely, then we'll schedule them for their first in-person interview. And I know that a lot of business owners out there are, it's just them. But if you have the opportunity or if you have the option to have someone else in your company do that first interview, and then they vet them and then move them onto you for the final interview, that's really the best situation. I mean, I don't have to worry about any interviewees coming to me unless they are already like perfect and ready to go because they go through all these phases and channels before they even get to me. Okay. So now I have a question. Let's say that you have an interview and the employee or the prospective employee is showing up for the interview. Is there a series of questions that you ask or things that you do to qualify them at that point beyond those five initial questions? Absolutely. So the very first interview with Amanda, who's my operations manager, she goes through a day in the life of a magic mate. So she describes what the employee is going to be responsible for because we have solo cleaners. So they have a lot of responsibility as a solo cleaner. So they have to be able to handle their stuff. They've got to be able to show up on time. They have to be able to take care of their equipment. She explains how the pay works. She explains just what a day in the life is. And then if they seem like that is perfect, she also asks them a very, very important question. What are their financial requirements? Because most cleaning business owners in this country and me included, we can't just guarantee 40 hours right off the bat. It doesn't work like that. So we ask them right upfront, what are your financial requirements? And we feel it out. And if they say, you know, well, I have my last job was paying me, you know, $600 a week. And I have to make at least that they're not a good fit for us because they have to start part time. We have to make sure they're good. We have to make sure they're reliable. We have to make sure their skill level is there before we give them a full schedule. So we make sure that's what she makes sure. I mean, if it's a good fit, then she passes them on to me and then I dig in to who they are as a person. And I see if they're a good fit like culturally for us. You know, it's interesting that you brought that up because what we are not told in the house cleaning industry, and nobody really talks about this is when you onboard new employees, a lot of times they are not physically ready for a full shift. And so starting them out part time is a beautiful thing because they can kind of build up. It's like exercising where you build up those muscles. And the more you clean, the more efficient you become at it. But you are also then physically able to handle more. But starting out from scratch, many house cleaners cannot go for an eight hour day. They are just not physically ready until they've cleaned a few houses and got a few houses under their belt. And they've been doing it for a couple months. And then they're like, oh yeah, I can do another house in the same day. It's overwhelming mentally and physically. And you lose them fast. They burn out really quick whenever you do that. So we learned our lesson a long time ago and so we don't do that. Speaking of burnout, that is a very common issue. And I'm sure that in your rescue missions with your maid service, that you have come across a bunch of house cleaners and business owners that are in fact burned out. And so what do you recommend or what are you doing to help these business owners survive the burnout? Yeah, I mean, motivation is a huge, huge factor of success. I mean, if you, if you can't stay positive and stay motivated all the time, then you're just going to get burned out. You're going to be like, why did I even do this in the first place? Why do I have a business? And I'm just going to close it down. And I've come across tons of people in that spot. So typically what I like to do whenever I get to a rescue mission is we spend the first night kind of talking about who there is a person, why did they start their business, what motivates them, why they're doing it to begin with, what are their goals and their dreams and their ambition. And I kind of get them on that like cloud nine kind of feeling where they're like, oh, yeah, that's why I wanted to do this. And so we identify that at first. And then we kind of work from there and we say, okay, how can we get you to that as fast as possible? And that's whenever we start automating and everything else. But the biggest thing that I think that we help with as a company is the motivation part. So we actually have a subscription box, which is the first ever in our industry. And it's called monthly motivation. I'm going to show you what it looks like here. It's right behind me, but you can kind of see right here monthly motivation. And this is going to be full of a bunch of different things. But basically every month, they will get a book that is, you know, on some topic in our business like he myth or profit first, all of these books that we're all, you know, told to read all the time by all the consultants like, you need to read this, you need to read this. Well, it gets overwhelming. So every month, there's just, there's one book that we're going to focus on. And we have a book study in the private group of the people that subscribe. There's also going to be a tech gadget of some kind. There's going to be a fun and chic office supply to help you in the office kind of have motivation. There's going to be something to relieve stress in it. There's going to be a cleaning product or cleaning tool that you get to try and use. And if you like it, then you get some for the team. And then the most important thing is there's going to be an online training session. So rather than, you know, somebody dumping 30 modules on you at one time, it's a very simplified every month. It's one topic and it's one training. And that's how we're going to grow together as business owners, but we're going to do it in a way that's like stress-free and it's exciting because who doesn't love getting presents in the mail? That is fantastic. Okay. So since you brought this up, where do our listeners and our viewers go in order to subscribe to this magic box? They go to rescuemymadeservice.com and it's right there on the homepage. It's the most exciting thing we've ever done. So it'll be right there on the front and you can just click subscribe from there. And that, my friends, is Courtney Wisely. What a great topic to cover today and lots of tips that we can use immediately. So please check the show notes for everything that we talked about today, including links to Courtney and her motivation so that you guys can sign up and you can get your motivation inside a box. I love it. This is so exciting. If you found this helpful, please pass it on to a friend. And if we've earned your subscription, please subscribe. And until we meet again, leave the world a cleaner place than when you found it.